The Fall of the House of Boggs

In 2012, a remarkable battle unfolded in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Patton Boggs, the D.C. lobbying-and-law powerhouse co-founded by Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., faced off against Chevron, the sort of multinational corporation Patton Boggs normally represents. To the amazement of legal observers, the giant oil company accused Patton Boggs of participating in an extortion campaign rooted in the rain forest in Ecuador.

Arguing for Patton Boggs, James Tyrrell Jr. sputtered with indignation. “If someone seriously suggests that the 50-year-old law firm of Patton Boggs would wreck, would risk its professional reputation for a group of Ecuadorians whose case we feel strongly about, that we would be involved in a broad fraud, I suggest [to] whoever might believe that: I have a bridge in New York I might like to try to sell them.”

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Randy Mastro, a partner with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Chevron’s lead outside counsel, responded with equal vehemence: “Your Honor, Mr. Tyrrell asks the question, would Patton Boggs be risking their reputation on these Ecuadorian plaintiffs.” Mastro, a former mob prosecutor from New York, couldn’t have framed the issue better himself. “The answer, unfortunately, from their own documents, is yes. The answer is: A firm getting a contingency fee on $18.2 billion will do a lot of things that shock the conscience, and what they did here shocks the conscience.”

The clash did not end well for Patton Boggs. In 2014, tainted by Chevron’s allegations and hobbled by partner defections, one of the capital’s best connected law firms lost its independence and was absorbed into a less august partnership based in Cleveland. As a condition of its rescue by the Squire Sanders firm, Patton Boggs did the unthinkable: On bended knee, it withdrew from the rain forest-contamination case, paid a $15 million settlement to Chevron and issued a public statement of regret. Tyrrell, the rainmaker who’d persuaded fellow members of Patton Boggs leadership, to jump into the Chevron case in the first place, left the firm humiliated by his ex-partners’ acquiescence.

The tale of Patton Boggs’ being brought low illustrates how even the most sophisticated law and lobbying firms are willing to gamble with their reputations and balance sheets in the face of stiffening competition. Other vaunted firms hit even harder than Patton Boggs include Washington antitrust ace Howrey, defunct as of 2010, and New York-based Dewey & LeBoeuf, which collapsed two years later.

The end of Patton Boggs’ half-century as an independent firm brought down the curtain on a style of Washington influence-peddling that Tommy Boggs , who died at age 73 on Monday, helped invent and rode to phenomenal success and riches. Last May, when an enfeebled Patton Boggs — reduced to 330 lawyers from a peak of 550 — announced its merger into 1,300-attorney Squire Sanders, the PR spin was unpersuasive. Patton Boggs boasted that it had been “an industry game-changer” and “through our combination with Squire Sanders we are doing it again.” Hardly. The formation of the new Squire Patton Boggs revealed how a storied D.C. institution risked its standing for a quick score — and lost.

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In 2010, Patton Boggs had an august Washington pedigree but an uncertain future. The scion of the Boggs political family from Louisiana — former House Majority Leader Thomas Hale Boggs Sr. and Lindy Boggs, who succeeded her husband in Congress after he died — Tommy Boggs worked in the Lyndon Johnson administration and then, in 1966, helped start the firm that became Patton Boggs. In the 1970s, he pioneered a combination of lobbying-and-law practice that defined a new industry just as “K Street” was becoming the premier address for corporate influence in Washington. In 2011, the firm had revenue of $340 million, according to American Lawyer and placed 83 rd on the trade publication’s top-200 ranking of U.S. law firms.

In its heyday, Patton Boggs had grown alongside an expanding federal government, attracting top former officials as they moved through the revolving door to the private sector. Tommy Boggs had rivals — Robert Strauss of Akin Gump was one — but no one boasted more pull.

In the wake of the 2008 housing bust and recession, however, Patton Boggs faced head winds in a shifting business environment. Over the years, many major corporations had opened stand-alone lobbying offices. Industry-specific boutiques had proliferated, as had trade associations. The days were long gone when Tommy Boggs could pick up the phone and orchestrate a corporate bailout, as he did for Chrysler in 1979.

Yet even as competition intensified, Patton Boggs had expanded tremendously, increasing its overhead. During the 1990s and 2000s, it grew from a 150-lawyer firm to one with 550 attorneys and hundreds of other well-paid employees. Tyrrell’s talk of a quick score against Chevron thus found a mostly receptive audience, although some Patton Boggs partners expressed hesitation about getting in bed with the kind of freewheeling plaintiffs’ attorney who had been steering the case.

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Patton Boggs’ involvement in the Chevron case began in 2009, when Tyrrell, the lead partner in the firm’s Newark office, pitched the D.C.-based executive committee on an unconventional and potentially lucrative assignment to enforce a multibillion-dollar judgment that didn’t yet exist in Ecuador. Tyrrell, a member of the committee, explained that a New York hedge fund called Burford Capital was considering a major investment backing the plaintiffs in pending pollution litigation in Ecuador. Burford wanted Patton Boggs to enter the case at its side, so that if the plaintiffs were successful, the potent Washington law firm could make sure they got paid. Patton Boggs would get a quarter of the contingency fee.